Jumping to conclusions

Jumping to conclusions Change your perceptions, change your world

by Maria Nemeth

My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened. – Michel de Montaigne

We all act on evidence that we’re sure in the moment is accurate. But things don’t always turn out the way we thought they would. Or, even worse, sometimes situations turn out the same worn-out, predictable and boring way over and over again. The point is that our conclusions about what’s happening around us affect how we act, so we want to operate from conclusions that allow our actions to be effective – maybe even luminous.

The following incident brought this home for me. Alone one late summer afternoon, on the way back from a short hike in the California hills, I saw something brown and slithery in the distance. It was coiled in the middle of the path. A snake! I could see poison oak on either side of the trail, so there was no going around the snake. The sun was beginning to set. My heart beat fast. I saw images of myself up there all night, freezing and hungry. No one would know where I was.

I came closer, with caution. At about 30 feet, I saw the snake wasn’t moving. At the same time, my perception about the shape began to change. Was it a snake or some other animal I’d never seen before? Finally, when I was about 20 feet away, it hit me. This wasn’t a snake at all. It was a huge cow pie, dead centre in the middle of the road! I laughed, suddenly glad no one was there to see how foolish I had been. My heart rate slowed as I hiked down the hill.

My reaction had been appropriate to what I had “seen.” The perceived threat brought on a raised heartbeat and images of night on the trail alone. I could not have reacted otherwise. To pretend that I didn’t see a snake when I thought I did would have been impossible. It got me thinking: How much of my life is spent reacting to what I think is really out there, but may not be?

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell makes the compelling case that we are constantly reacting to conclusions we’ve drawn whether we are aware of them or not. They dictate our choices and shape our behaviour more than we know. Par ticularly striking is the fact that many conclusions are like reflexes; we don’t control them. They have the automatic quality of a knee-jerk response.

But all is not lost. Through choosing how to direct the focus of your attention, you do have the power to ultimately determine your experience of life and how satisfying that experience will be. If you want to change how you experience your life, it is not, I repeat not, necessary to change your thoughts. All you need to do is shift your focus to those that interest you more. This is no trivial dis tinction. First, is your brain busy? Try to make a tick mark for every thought you have in a two-minute period and you’ll be astounded at how many of them pass in front of you. It’s an endless parade.

If you really tried to change your thoughts, it could drive you crazy. How could you stop each thought marching in the parade long enough to change it? addition, you become rigid and hemmed in by your thoughts, which seem to get louder as they repeat themselves over and over again. That’s because whatever you focus on repeats itself. So trying to change your thoughts keeps your focus on those thoughts, causing them to recycle. Ultimately more elegant, easy and power ful than trying to change your thoughts is learning to shift the way you think them. To create results that will excite you as well as warm that heart of yours will be easier than you think because you won’t have to change your thoughts.

What you will learn instead is how to shift the focus of your attention from the have helped us survive since prehistoric times. Since we’re not as physically rug ged as many animals, we have learned to size up situations and people quickly. This gives us an edge; once again, this is the amygdala in action.

The human brain is, in fact, wired for conclusions, even from a perceptual point of view. When you can’t draw conclusions, it is disorienting. To show you what I mean, imagine the following: You’re in a room. Wherever you look – on the floor, ceiling and walls – all you see is the kind of visual “snow” or static you’d get from a television with no reception. You hear no noise. The lights

We are hardwired to react to what we perceive, be it real or

not. Neurophysiological research shows that the brain often

fails to distinguish between what is happening outside, in

physical reality, and what’s going on inside the brain itself.

That’s the principle behind guided visualizations.

Think of the energy expenditure! You’d soon be exhausted and frustrated and I can see the fog rolling in just thinking about this futile process.

You might say that, instead of chang ing your thoughts, you simply won’t think them. Good luck. This is equally difficult because your brain basically doesn’t understand the word “don’t.” For the next 10 seconds, try not to think about a hot fudge sundae with nuts and whipped cream. Go ahead, don’t think about it. What happens? You guessed it. Rows of hot fudge sundaes parade through your head.

This aspect of brain function – focusing upon the subject, even when it’s preceded by a “don’t” or “not” – is well understood by therapists who use hypnosis. For example, look at the following two phrases and pick the one that would most clearly produce the intended result: • Don’t forget to take your car keys when you leave. • Remember to take your car keys when you leave.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? The first suggestion puts “forget to take your keys” into your mind. The second, “remember to take your keys,” is easier for the brain to follow and therefore more apt to influence your behaviour in the desired manner.

It is difficult both to try to change a thought or conclusion and to ignore one you already have. Each strategy takes a lot of energy and gives few results. In conclusions that no longer interest you to the ones that do. And, as we shall see, shifting your attention has nothing what soever to do with changing those conclusions. As the energy of your attention is withdrawn, those old conclusions simply recede into the background. Let’s take a look at the process we all use to create life experiences. The four-box model illustrates the process. We start with box one, which is labelled “conclusion.” Normally, we think that a conclusion is an opinion we form after we’ve considered relevant facts or evidence. But here we put it first. In effect, we’re saying, “In the beginning was the conclusion.”

The mind is a conclusion-manufacturing machine. For example, it’s common knowledge that people form conclusions about each other within one or two minutes. Gladwell writes that these conclusions are often created in a matter of seconds. He calls it “thin slicing.” As I’ve worked with people over the years, I’ve noticed the following sequence: 1. A conclusion is like a reflex. It takes very little to set one off. 2. Once it’s triggered, the brain only looks for evidence that will validate that conclusion. 3. Therefore, our evidence is automatically and predominantly determined by the triggered conclusion, not the other way around.

This power to generate quick conclusions about our environment may

OCTOBER 2007 . . 5 aren’t glaring. Just that static, wherever you direct your gaze.

How long could you last in that room? You’re facing no obvious threat, but your inability to draw perceptual conclusions, or gestalts as they’re called in perceptual psychology, could make you very agitat ed. So it becomes clear that we all gather evidence to support the conclusions that interest us. What’s more, not everyone sees a situation in the same way, even when presented with the same “objective” facts. One place this becomes obvious is when listening to different members talk about the same family.

Take Jim, for example. We were talking about the four-box paradigm in a seminar, and he came up with the following: “Sometimes I think my brothers and I were born in different families. I mean that we don’t see things the same way when we talk about our parents. continued on p.50